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Jurors hear call between sex suspect, ex-girlfriend

Johnnie Walker told a former girlfriend he thought he was chatting with her, not another person who was posing as a 14-year-old girl, when he made sexual references during Internet chats, according to a phone conversation that police secretly recorded.

The conversation between Walker, 51, and his former girlfriend, Greta Pesek, was played to jurors Wednesday during the second day of Walker’s trial on charges of attempted Internet luring of a child and attempted enticement of a child.

Walker, a former activities director for Grand Junction High School, used a school laptop computer to engage in the sexually explicit chats between March 3 and March 27, 2007.

Pesek, who lived on the Front Range at the time Walker was being investigated, worked with the Parker Police Department to record the phone conversation, which she made to Walker.

“I promise you I thought it was you,” Walker is recorded saying to Pesek. “I was just bringing up the same old stuff because I thought it was you. Why I put this together that it was you — obviously it was the biggest mistake in my life.”

In the phone conversation, Walker encouraged Pesek to tell the truth to police and repeatedly apologized to her for bringing her into the situation. Walker told Pesek he thought she was trying to contact him in the chat room, and he believed she was posing as a 14-year-old girl and using a different user name to conceal her identity so other men in her life would not know she was communicating with him.

Pesek testified Wednesday she had been in an abusive relationship previously and was in another relationship when she occasionally was seeing and communicating with Walker.

Walker said in the recorded phone call he assumed the chats were with Pesek. He told her he kept engaging in the talk, hoping she would call him or allow him to call her, and that’s why he offered to purchase her a cell phone, so they could talk privately.

He told her his comment during the Internet chat about wanting to kidnap her was to signal she could start a new life in Grand Junction.

“As I look back on it now, it was me putting things together in my head about you. I just thought something was going on and wanted to make sure you were OK,” Walker said on the recording.

Pesek testified that she met Walker online in 2003 and the two had a rendezvous in Morrison. The two occasionally met, had sexual relations and communicated mostly by instant messaging and text messaging, she testified.

Pesek said much of the conversation with Walker that was taped by police was out of character for him because he usually didn’t talk much, and the two hadn’t talked for about a year prior to the investigation into Walker’s conduct in April 2007. Only two lines of a copy of the Internet chat resembled any conversations she had with Walker in the past, Pesek testified.

“At the time, what was he trying to do?” Deputy District Attorney David Waite asked Pesek.

“I guess sleep with me,” Pesek answered.

During the Internet chats in March 2007, Walker actually was communicating with Jason Steitle, a 36-year-old Texas man who was posing as a teenage girl in an effort to catch child predators.